The Saga of Mary Gold

In the late 1910s, Sidney Smith developed a formula of the daily strip that would makeThe Gumpsone of the most popular comics of the 1920s and himself one of the richest cartoonists of his day.By the end of the decade Sidney Smith's The Gumpshad secured a huge and loyal audience with a decade of melodrama, adventure, mystery, and comedy. So devoted were his readers, in fact, that they regularly wrote in to offer advice for his characters' love lives and business decisions and they generally treated the characters as friends and family members. In 1928-29, with the launching of what would be his most famous story, "The Saga of Mary Gold," Smith's relationship to his readers would be tested as never before. Its heartbreaking conclusion would change comics forever. Here for the first time since the story made headlines across America in the spring of 1929 we reprint the saga that Hogan's Alley magazine called "One of the Ten Biggest Events in Comics History"—a tale that has lost none of its power to captivate readers in the 21st Century. LOAC?ESSENTIALS reprints, in yearly volumes, the rare early daily newspaper strips that are essential to comics history, seminal strips that are unique creations in their own right, while also significantly contributing to the advancement of the medium.